Presentation

    Resort to natural law is one way of conveying the philosophical conviction that moral norms are not merely conventional rules. Accordingly, the notion of natural law has a clear metaphysical dimension, since it involves the recognition that, from the inside of human society and history, human beings do not conceive themselves as sheer products of society and history. And yet, if natural law is to be considered the fundamental law of practical reason, it must show also some intrinsic relationship to history and positive law.

To the extent that moral norms emerge through this kind of tension between the metaphysical and the practical, we cannot abstract from either extreme without renouncing to the classical concept of natural law. This is why the philosophical elaboration of natural law presents this notion as a “limit-concept”, in which most characteristic human tensions converge: between metaphysics and ethics, between the mutable and the inmutable; between is and ought, and, in connection with the latter, even the tension between politics and eschatology as a double horizon of ethics.

Modern and recent history of ethics, however, shows that those tensions do not admit easy conceptual control. Sooner or later this renunciation results in a philosophical devaluation of ethical reflection, which wanting to be practical becomes pragmatical, or else wanting to be metaphysical forgets about being practical. Insofar this dialectic is still operative in contemporary ethics, it may be advisable to reflect upon the notion of natural law, as one of the philosophical concepts which better preserves those typically human tensions.